Room-sized particle accelerator surfs the wave

0 Comments | AFP, December, 2006

PARIS (AFP) — French physicists say they have developed a table-top-sized particle accelerator, a gadget that normally would need the equivalent of several large rooms. Jerome Faure and Victor Malka at the ENSTA/CNRS laboratory near Paris injected electrons into a plasma wave created by a single intense laser pulse.

Their work, reported on Thursday in the weekly British journal Nature, builds on a two-year-old discovery in which scientists ionized helium, forming a plasma wave on which the electrons rode, like surfers catching an ocean break. The French advance is to improve the technique so that the electron beam, previously unstable and highly variable, is stable and regulated, thanks to a second laser pulse that fires electrons like a slingshot into the plasma wave....